A famous legend surrounding the creation of Anna Karenina tells us that Tolstoy began writing a cautionary tale about adultery and ended up by falling in love with his magnificent heroine. It is rare to find a reader of the book who doesn't experience the same kind of emotional upheaval: Anna Karenina is filled with major and minor characters who exist in their own right and fully embody their mid-nineteenth-century Russian milieu, but it still belongs...

What is free will? Is redemption possible? Can logic help us answer moral questions? Renowned Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky tackles all of these topics and many more in this remarkable novel, widely regarded as one of the classic masterpieces of literature. Follow the Karamazov family through the travails that transpire after the murder of their father, and expand your intellectual horizons with a work that celebrated thinkers such as Einstein,

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Tells the story of a gifted architect, his struggle against conventional standards, and his violent love affair.

Jude the Obscure, the semi-autobiographical final novel from Thomas Hardy explores notions of surprising candor; within the eponymous protagonist lies the tragic truth of failed ambitions and relationships. In a fierce exploration of the darkness of love and the intellect, this is one of the great tragic novels of English literature. Jude Fawley, an earnest boy from a rural English village, dreams of a life of academia despite his working-class background....

In nineteenth-century England, Dorthea Brooke's wishes to defy social conventions are inhibited by the strict nature of her surroundings

A ne'er-do-well exploits his gentle daughter's beauty for social advancement in this masterpiece of tragic fiction. Hardy's 1891 novel defied convention to focus on the rural lower class for a frank treatment of sexuality and religion. Then and now, his sympathetic portrait of a victim of Victorian hypocrisy offers compelling reading.

We still had a lot of time left, so dad, Julie, and I began stretching. Dad isn't very flexible, so he made lots of funny faces and noises while touching his toes and stretching his arms. People turned around to stare at us, and Julie and I giggled. Dad was so funny! And then it was finally time for us to board our plane to Korea. I was so excited! Korea, here I come!

A man and a great ape conduct a series of philosophical conversations in a work that presents a new vision of evolution and humankind and asks the question: does the Earth belong to humans, or do humans belong to the Earth?

The timely story of the forces of change that converge on a small tribe of Niaruna Indians living in the heart of the Amazonian rain forest.

From the Publisher: From a swashbuckling pirate fantasy to a meditation on American morality-two classic Steinbeck novels make their black spine debuts. In awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with The Winter of Our Discontent, he had "resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American." Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of...